Family: Starting the day off right

Arkansas delivers thousands of free and reduced-cost school breakfasts to keep low-income children from being too hungry to learn, writes Ron Wolfe in Family.

The state’s breakfast plan — among the nation’s most effective hunger relief programs — brought actor Jeff Bridges to Stephens Elementary School in Little Rock on March 17. The orange button on his gray jacket spoke up before he did, reading: “Breakfast = Success.”

Bridges is national spokesman for the Washington-based Share Our Strength’s No Kid Hungry campaign, including Arkansas No Kid Hungry. While in town, he joined a group of Stephens third-graders in learning about the importance of a good breakfast, be it eggs, toast and milk, or waffle and orange juice.

The school surrounded him “with good, excited people,” Bridges said. Other times, “I feel alone,” he said, pushing for answers to a tragedy that nobody wants to hear. “It’s an unsexy issue.”

See Wednesday’s Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for more about breakfast in the schools and related issues.